* In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were of Hispanic heritage; 34 million people, 12.2 per cent, of the population older than 5 years speak Spanish at home. In the U.S., Spanish has a long history in the United States (many southern states were part of Mexico and Spain) and it recently has been revitalized by much immigration from Latin America. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. Although the U.S. has no formally designated “official languages”, Spanish is formally recognized at the state level, beside English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico 30 per cent of the population speak it. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico. In total, the U.S. has the world’s fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population.** Significant numbers of the populations of these countries speak SpanishSpanish was the original official language of the The Phlippines for more than three centuries, and became the lingua franca of the Philippines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Spanish was the language of the Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Malolos Constitution proclaimed it as the official language. However, Spanish was spoken by a total of 60% of the population in the early 1900′s as a first, second or third language. Following the American occupation of the Philippines, its use declined after 1940. Currently, only a few Mestizos of Spanish or Hispanic origin speak it as their first language, although a few others use it together with Filipino and English.